REVIEWS IN BRIEF / October Suite

Amy Benfer

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, December 23, 2001

October Suite

By Maxine Clair

RANDOM HOUSE; 322 Pages; $23.95

The best things about Maxine Clair's "October Suite" have to do with her gentle, loving evocations of the black middle class in the Midwest in the middle part of the last century. The sections that concern mid-century jazz are pretty good, too.

As the novel opens, October Brown is a 23-year-old first year teacher in love with snappy Vogue-patterned outfits and her own independence, until she falls for a feckless married handyman, who leaves her when she becomes pregnant. She goes home to live with the two proud, kind elderly aunts who raised October and her sister, Vergie, after their mother's murder at the hand of their father. October's ambivalence about motherhood is met by Vergie's passion for it, and October agrees to allow her son to be raised by her married sister.

Clair, a poet and author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection "Rattlebone" (which also featured October Brown), is a master of subtle characterization -- the ways one asserts oneself as a person of "quality," the formal yet musical nature of her characters' diction, the veneer of politeness in which the sisters convey their rage to each other.

One wishes she would trust her own subtlety. Unfortunately, as the novel winds up, Clair seems compelled to provide a happy ending to every sad tale she has told. The tying up of these loose ends feels less satisfying than their initial unravelings. And the dead mother who breaks in intermittently to send advice to her daughters from beyond the grave simply must go.